SaintsCanada wrote:You misunderstand me Eujin. I wasn't implying Big Ben is Canadian, I was implying people from countries where the NFL isn't popular are dumb and/or bad.

You might want to stop digging this hole for yourself. I've seen your posts on Facebook and you come across as a really good and intelligent guy. I have not always agreed with you on this forum though. Is this your "other" side? Just asking, because this seems to be the case with me.

SaintsCanada wrote:You misunderstand me Eujin. I wasn't implying Big Ben is Canadian, I was implying people from countries where the NFL isn't popular are dumb and/or bad.

You might want to stop digging this hole for yourself. I've seen your posts on Facebook and you come across as a really good and intelligent guy. I have not always agreed with you on this forum though. Is this your "other" side? Just asking, because this seems to be the case with me.

Ah, I violated Poe's Law (all sarcasm on the internet will be mistaken as sincere). Forgot the emoticon. Sorry.

While we're (I'm) on the subject of B teams in Germany, let me just add here that I've really had enough of Bayern. They are seriously fucking up what could otherwise be a really entertaining league, basically using the rest of the league as a farm system and cherry picking the best players from everyone else. The latest rumour is they're going to get Marcus Reus too, because shoehorning Robben, Müller, Shaqiri, Lewandowski, Ribery, Pizarro and Götze into their front four isn't enough of a challenge, all of whom would be first name on the team sheet at all other clubs. It's not even worth watching the highlights of their matches on TV, which fortunately are always at the end of the highlights show so I can just switch it off.

The only silver lining is that by beating Roma 7-1 away they've almost certainly ruled themselves out of winning the Champions League. Here's hoping at least.

People still complain how Roman's money ruined Premier League. If it wasn't his money, the rest of the Epl clubs would have in similar situation feeding for Manchester United.

Glad that now there are at least 4-5 teams capable of wining the title. Still, Man Utd are arrogant enough to claim they are biggest club in the world and one in 5 football fan in the world supports them. Glad that they fell from grace so badly last year. Hope it may long continue.With the departure of Ferguson, even Howard Webb showed his back to them.

I get the impression the 'super clubs' like Bayern, Real Madrid, Barcelona etc are slowly but surely pulling away from the rest now. Watching Liverpool getting destroyed by Real kinda brings that point home.

Can't see that ending in anything other than a European Super League either with or without UEFA. Eventually you might see a few wealthy Middle Eastern and US teams included also.

A new fan grouping (which according to the media is "growing rapidly") had a gathering of around 4,000 in Cologne centre yesterday. They call themselevs HoGeSa, which stands for Hooligans Gegen Salafisten or "Hooligans against Salafists" which is supposedly an anti-Islamic State, anti-Islamic Fundamentalist movement connecting fans across clubs who see it as their role to fight IS. And the police it seems, after a police van was overturned and 44 policemen were injured. The term "Salafist" is often used in Germany to denote the organisations that can be seen in Germany shopping centres handing out Islam-inspired leaflets and trying to recruit particularly young men to various causes.

Recognising that the "hooligan scene is limited" they want to broaden their appeal to become a mass movement. The government are already talking about banning them.

A lot is written in the UK about Germany's 50+1 rule (in the OP for example). This is a rule that supposedly prevents individuals and corporations from taking over clubs and ruining them like they do in the UK. The majority of the voting rights in the professional clubs have to be held by sports clubs which in turn are owned by club members. This rule has explicit exceptions for Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, both of which are fully owned by corporations and Hoffenheim which is 96% owned by Dietmar Hopp, a former IBM programmer who founded software company SAP. The first two are allowed because they were always like that and the last one is allowed because Mr Hopp has spent over twenty years investing in the club.

Now the Hannover 96 President, Martin Kind, looks set to be able to take over full control of the professional club after an attempt by ordinary club members to stop him fell short of the needed two thirds majority in a club vote last week. 263 (60.5%) people voted to stop him and 171 (39.5%) voted to allow him to carry on. The reason why two thirds was needed is because the board had already decided to allow Kind to proceed and the members were attempting to overturn the board's decision. The chairman of the board is unsurprisingly Martin Kind.

The club actually has 4,200 members, most of whom play badminton or tennis and can't be bothered to turn up to vote at meetings. The club also has 20,000 associate members, mostly football fans, but they don't get to vote. (It costs a lot more to be a voting member than an associate member, and the main advantage is being able to use the club facilities to play tennis etc.) So now Kind can go ahead and apply for an exception to the 50+1 rule from the German Football League because he has been investing in Hannover for over twenty years. This may actually allow him to separate the professional team and stadium holding company entirely from the sports club and open it up to outside investors. He's not very popular amongst sections of the Hannover fans, but has started to get a bit of a cult following with their main rivals Braunschweig.

The rule that prevents a corporation or individual from having a majority of the voting rights, does not prevent a corporation or individual from providing the majority of the cash that keeps the professional team going. For example Red Bull provide 99% of the funding for RB Leipzig and a consortium led by Klaus Hofmann provides 99% of the funding for Koo Ja-cheol's club Augsburg. This means that an investor can saddle the club with unpayable debts, as long as the board and the club members agree to it. Nobody seems to know exactly how the voting rights are split at Leipzig, but it doesn't really matter as the club that by rule must have at least 50%, is only made up of 17 people, all of whom are possibly employees of Red Bull. Red Bull have explicitly stated that they don't want the traditional German club ownership culture in Leipzig.

Ironically, as people in the UK are trying to copy the German club ownership model, Germany itself seems to be moving away from it. There's a good chance that two of next year's Champions League spots will be taken by German clubs with "creative" ownership structures in Hoffenheim (currently 4th) and Leipzig (currently 2nd).